February 1, 2021
Michael Mayer, owner and CEO of Main Event Digital is featured on a new episode of the Hollywood Branded podcast, “Marketing Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them).” Host Stacy Jones picks Mayer’s brain about digital marketing and e-commerce best practices forged through his more than 20 years experience and his pioneering role in leading digital transformations of billion dollar companies.
Founded in 2020, Main Event Digital is a cutting edge and expert-driven B2B-focused boutique agency that develops customized solutions to help businesses optimize their digital marketing and e-commerce capabilities. “User experience is at the core of everything we do,” Mayer states during the podcast.
Among Main Event Digital’s primary services include website design, building out affiliate programs, social campaigns, content creation, search engine optimization (SEO), loyalty programs, marketing automation, marketplaces and paid search and paid social advertising.
Over the course of the more-than-hour-long, information-packed podcast, Mayer offers tips on how to avoid digital marketing and e-commerce mistakes and pitfalls, from how to keep a company’s brand fresh and reputation building to driving business through fully-functional apps.
“Marketing Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)” is a weekly Hollywood Branded podcast in which Jones interviews industry experts and thought leaders about branding best practices and strategies.
About Main Event Digital
Not content to merely “go the distance,” Main Event Digital offers manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers knockout B2B and B2C digital marketing services. Clients include Prestige Distribution, Midwest Industrial Metals, AMS Staffing, Travers Tools and others. In his nearly 25-year career, founder and CEO Michael Mayer has established himself as an influential B2B e-commerce strategist. He has led the digital transformations for billion-dollar organizations, including U.S. Electrical Services, Crescent Electric and Thermo Fisher Scientific. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and a consultant on e-commerce and digital marketing software. He lives in suburban Chicago with his wife and family. He enjoys boxing in his spare time.
For more information, email mdmayer@maineventdigital.com or call (773) 405-3635.
Podcast Transcript Below:
Hollywood Branded Podcast
Marketing Mistakes & How to Avoid Them
Episode 237
All Things E-Commerce and Digital Marketing with Mike Mayer | Main Event Digital
Host: Stacy Jones
Guest: Mike Mayer
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Stacy: Welcome to Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them. I'm Stacy Jones the founder of Influencer Marketing and Branded Content Agency, Hollywood Branded. This podcast provides brand marketers, a learning platform for topics, for us to share their insights and knowledge on topics, which make a direct impact on your business today.
While it is impossible to be well-versed on every topic and strategy that can improve bottom line results. My goal is to help you avoid making costly mistakes of time, energy, or money, whether you are doing a DIY approach or hiring an expert to help. Let's begin today's discussion.
Intro: Welcome to Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them. Here's your host, Stacy Jones.
Stacy: Welcome to Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them. I'm Stacy Jones, and I'm so happy to be here with you all today, and I want to give a very warm welcome to Mike Mayer. Mike is the owner and CEO of Main Event Digital. A digital marketing agency that specializes in web design, SEO and e-commerce services. With over 20 years of experience, leading digital transformations for billion-dollar businesses.
Mike is an expert in all things e-commerce and digital. He is a regular guest speaker at industry conferences, has published numerous articles on digital marketing and has also helped launch three startups in the digital consulting, consignment and online retail fields.
Today, Mike will be sharing B2B marketing strategies along with e-commerce and mobile launch best practices. We'll learn what works from Mike's perspective, what should be avoided and how some businesses just miss the mark. Mike, welcome. So happy to have you here today.
Mike: Thank you so much, Stacy. Happy to be here.
Stacy: Awesome. What I'd love to do is have our listeners learn a little bit more about what got you here today. You recently, and when I say recently it wasn't yesterday, but you've recently started your own agency and you have a storied history of working at some very large companies and doing very large partnerships. What made you decide to trek out on your own?
Mike: Great question. For the last, as you mentioned over 20 years, I've been in technology specifically e-commerce and digital marketing. I would consider myself a pioneer in the field. I started actually pre-worldwide web creation invention back in '89, '90 running bulletin boards systems, which probably most of your listeners have never heard of, but Google it and you'll find out.
And then just got hooked and trained to be a developer. Started as a web developer, went to work and quickly moved into management. And, most specifically over the past 14 years have been focused on, working at three wholesalers, starting and running e-commerce and digital marketing. And throughout that period thought, this is great. I'm seeing a lot of success. Why not try this same approach for many companies that look the same as the companies I was working for?
So started my own, this is just since April of 2020, right after COVID hit. Started this out of my home office and targeting manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors. Even though that's who I'm targeting, it's really more of a B2B focus. So, I'd say like 40%, 50% of my customers don't fit the mold of a wholesaler or a manufacturer, but are service-based businesses selling to other businesses.
So that's kind of the backstory, but we're a full-service digital marketing agency offering a whole variety of services. I consider us an e-commerce system integrator. We're not doing any major dev projects that run for a year or two. Doing more smaller builds of e-commerce sites and apps, mainly on Shopify, WooCommerce on WordPress, Magento, Wix, Webflow. Most of our time is spent on the development and then more into the digital marketing areas.
We start with customers that have a presence or don't have a presence. We've built startups, since April, which I'm happy to talk about some of those companies. We'll sit down and we'll do the branding logo, design, web design, doing the markup, building out the site, building out product content. Because typically the wholesalers have no product content or have just pulled together, some very basic product numbers and basic manufacturer content.
We have folks that will flesh out that content rewrite it. So, it's unique for SEO. We build that into the site. We run a full SEO strategy on the site where we're managing the technical SEO, making sure that sites are fast, responsive has all the correct tags.
And then we go offsite, and run a backlink strategy, especially with press-release blast to get our client's information and back links into media throughout the country. With that we run paid search campaigns. We run paid social campaigns. We run social for these clients. And I I'll keep going, if I'm not boring you.
Stacy: No, you're not boring. All of those are great.
Mike: We set up marketing automation. We build out lead gen campaigns. We're selling for our clients on marketplaces, Amazon, Walmart. We load huge catalogs up to those sites and automate, competitive pricing, especially on products that our clients are not the only sellers of that product. We automate that. On social we're running campaigns and running social for our clients on Facebook, Insta, LinkedIn, Twitter, doing a ton of content creation beyond just that product content builds out.
We're writing long form content. As I mentioned for press release blasts. Also, for website content, for blogs, for social. Structuring affiliate programs, to bring in larger sales forces for our clients, that they would just then pay on a rev share. And structuring loyalty programs, which are really moving the needle for return customers and increasing average order value, by rewarding our client's customers with store credit or swag.
We're doing a lot of one-off email marketing and we have some folks that are doing video too. We’ve produced television commercials, doing videos for social, testimonial videos, you name it. We've actually done billboards like outside of digital and direct mail. We are your outsourced e-commerce digital marketing department and we'll figure out what you need and get it done.
Stacy: Well, one of the reasons I wanted you and I kept letting you, I wasn't going to interrupt you as you were naming all the different services that you do is those are all, if you're launching an e-commerce brand. Literally everything you said is going to be component that you as an owner of a company or your team needs to actually consider.
Mike: Absolutely.
Stacy: Because people I think come in and they're like, "I'm going to sell on Shopify and I'm going to set it up and the world is going to come and I'm going to be a millionaire, and this is going to be awesome." And then nothing happens after you've done that.
Mike: I think you nailed it. And that just like hits on the whole topic of your podcast with mistakes that people make. They assume when they build it, people will come. And that couldn't be further from the truth. There are millions of websites. So, you need all of that marketing to get people to your site. And there's definitely ways to do it inexpensively, and to sustain long-term traffic through the SEO and through, buying up mailing lists and doing email marketing. But it's critical.
And it's critical to have that attack of your potential customer base from all different angles. I didn't mention, we're doing SMS marketing too, through texts. You want to hit your customers when they're hanging out on social, through their email. If you can get them while they're on the highway, reading a billboard, when you're retargeting them or targeting them through display ads, when they're on any website, there's just ample opportunity.
And it all goes back to that drip strategy where you need to hit them, seven times before they even recognize your brand. And then you actually have an opportunity to start selling to them, but it has to happen. And I see this more in B2B than in B2C. Where B2B spend all their time, effort, money on building, and then they just sit there and wonder why aren't people using it.
And even if you have an existing business with a large customer base, this is very common where you have a sales team, you have an inside and outside sales, you have stores. And you think once I add this website to the mix, my customers will use this also, but that's not the case. And what I find is typically not only do the customers not know about it, know about the benefits, but your sales team and your employees don't know about it, and can't support it.
And often their incentives aren't even aligned to tell customers about it. I've been in businesses where the employees deter and direct people away from using the websites because they lose money. So, you need to make sure the motivation and the incentive plans are established. They won, or you're going to be swimming against the stream.
Stacy: So, when a company comes to you, what's the first thing you do? How do you figure out what their strategy should be versus telling them that laundry list that you just gave? And having them literally flee out the door because they're so overwhelmed and they know that they don't have the budgets necessarily to tackle all of that at once.
Mike: That's a great question. Typically, it starts with me asking a lot of questions and getting to know them, their business model, how they operate. I love to tap into any existing analytics they might have, that they can share. And I like to do an analysis of what type of marketing they're already doing, what their user experience is on their website. And based on that, I draft a strategy and build a roadmap, which has some, or all of the things that I've just mentioned.
I prioritize that, based on a potential return on investment, which I attempted everything I've just mentioned in so many different businesses that I have a good idea of what works and what doesn't. And I can even come to the client with potential, our returns on investment so that we can make educated decisions on what we're going to target, first, second, and third.
And the way I run my business; I have to figure out a better way to communicate this because I have packages on my website with different services. In reality, every customer is unique and every customer needs a custom package. There's definitely no one size fits all. And even if I'm working with my third or fourth lighting wholesaler, it's not the same approach. Everyone needs their own approach.
So, I build a custom roadmap, and then we just start going down the list, running through the strategies, executing on them. Revenue attribution is the center, the base, the key to everything we do, to be able to track, to see if these activities are working. And then based on what we see after the first few activities we might change course. And it's an ever living, breathing strategy and roadmap that needs to be tweaked based on the analytics and what's working and what's not.
Stacy: What do you think are your top three strategies that are your go to’s? That you're just like, you know, pretty much every time. And I know that everything you said is viable for pretty much every brand and company, but what are your top three that if someone doesn't do, they're missing the mark?
Mike: Sure. The foundation of every single customer is their website. So, it all starts with a, QA. I have a full-time QA guy, so we test their website. We make sure that thing is working perfectly. We do an analysis of the user experience, and we do some user experience improvements. We try to optimize that conversion rate and make sure that it's fast and responsive.
Once we have that, that's usually number one. First thing we do with almost every client is we got to get our house in order. Once we have that website working perfectly or close to perfect, then we go into more of the marketing strategies. We almost always start on the SEO strategy day one, although that is typically not an immediate response from SEO.
Sometimes takes three months, six months. The fastest I've ever seen some responsiveness to SEO has been a week. And that's recently with a client. They build cannabis dispensary's and grow houses throughout the country. So, we built a bunch of SEOs, optimized pages for them like cannabis or dispensary builder in Montana and they're grow America builders, they show up number one, number two. So that was the best SEO success I've ever seen.
Stacy: Well, there was a hole, obviously. There was like, the Google was hungry actually, because there wasn't a lot of content there to fill that. And that's why you got such pickup.
Mike: That's correct. And if it's less of a unique business, that's a pretty unique business. Then we focus on the long- tail keywords that don't have a ton of competition. And we build out the lengthy pages on the website about those keywords.
Stacy: My own agency, my own business, I have to credit our sales success when we get new clients. It's because of the SEO strategies that we put back in place back in 2012, when we started building our blog and we had done no optimization before that, on our website.
And what really, really did it though, was the content generation starting with one blog post, then two blog posts, then three, then five a week until we consistently have over 30,000 readers on a monthly basis for a B2B business, which is awesome for a small agency. It's awesome. And it's how we actually establish our expertise.
But back in 2012, the pulling teeth and the pain of actually getting this started, if someone had said, well, this is the end goal. I probably would've been like, Oh, by then I want to have 100,000, 500,000, because we always want more, but it caused me to change my strategies and suggestions for clients.
I know that, paying for advertising, traditional advertising that does so much to move the needle quickly, but that SEO optimization it's there. It's built in. And as long as you're, still Google's loving you, that is going to keep serving up for you forever. And it's not too early ever in your business's life stage in my opinion, to start that.
Mike: A lot of businesses will put that off because they want to see immediate action, but it pays dividends. There's only a one-time investment for the most part pays dividends indefinitely. But for the customers that want to see immediate action, you lean on paid search and depending on the client, paid social.
We’ve been most successful with our wholesalers pushing into Google and Bing Shopping where it's super long-tail customers are coming right to a product detail. And their intent is they're ready to purchase or they're checking pricing. That's as close to we're getting these people through the sales funnel, for a new business or for an existing business, through paid is through the shopping.
The other thing that we've found as low hanging fruit is marketplaces. And most of our customers had no presence on Amazon or Walmart. And there's nothing more immediate. We launched their listings and the next day we're seeing activity and sales. And for some those that don't have map policies to abide by, and that are selling the same products as everyone else. The automation of pricing is ever so critical because it's a race to the bottom and whoever has the lowest price as you know, on the marketplaces wins.
We set that up where there is a margin floor that we don't exceed. So that even if we hit that lowest possible price, that the wholesaler is willing to go down to, they're still making enough margin to make that sale worthwhile. So, getting the house in order with the web design SEO, paid search and marketplaces, those are my go-to with all clients. And then we kind of build out from there.
Stacy: And you mentioned press, you said, you do press releases for SEO optimization, and you're doing that for link building. You're sending it out, you're posting the site and you're actually building authority on Google so that it's recognizing the company and giving it more authority.
Mike: Absolutely. It's, amazing how quickly that works for SEO. And I don't know, we put it out on the wire. It usually shows up on 450 different media outlets, like a USA Today or Chicago Tribune. So, we're getting good positioning whether or not people are actually reading that. I don't know, but Google loves it. So, they're following the backlinks from those very reputable sources and that boosts my clients on SEO really quickly in organic search.
Stacy: Yes. We do a lot of PR for clients and work with clients with establishing, how to get campaigns, known about of that fill. And so many times we were like, "Oh, if you do a press release, I'm going to get so much exposure and all these publications."
And that's just not how it works anymore, but it's so awesome. As far as just putting those links out there, it doesn't matter that no human eye may ever see them because it's going to impact all of your searches. It's going to impact where you show up on other pages. All of a sudden Google's like, Oh, you're legit. You're cool.
Mike: Exactly. And then we go beyond the press releases to focus on the PR aspect of our business. And we'll reach out to folks that run podcasts like you, or trade mags, or the media directly. And we'll send them our briefs and try to get into their publications, through either a guest blog or we'll send them product. We've had a lot of success getting on the local news and especially on the B2B side, getting into trade association, newsletters, their blogs and their websites that's typically pretty easy to do.
It just takes a lot of heavy lifting because there's a lot of them out there. And there's a, one-on-one, negotiation and presentation of content and tweaking. But it's worthwhile because in the B2B side, that's where a lot of your customer base is getting their industry news. It's from the trade and association publications. So that's worked well.
Stacy: And so, first ground level for you is making sure that website is optimized built well. The second you had mentioned was putting together and basically an SEO strategy. And the third level that you were talking about, is getting everything so that you have paid social or paid advertising, paid advertise, whatever it is on social platforms. Google ad words, anything that is digitally driven, paid.
Mike: That's correct. And then we can expand out from there.
Stacy: And where would you expand from there? I said top three round, like now, what do you do then?
Mike: Keep going. So, we have a full-time guy that is running our social campaigns for all of our customers. So, he's putting out, not paid, but just posting into everyone's feeds, building followers. He moonlights as a comedian. So, he's very creative.
Stacy: He's funny.
Mike: He's funny. Yes. And engaging. So, he's putting together a lot of great content for Facebook and Insta and LinkedIn and Twitter. It helps brand building, helps keep your brand fresh in the minds of your followers. It's also good to just have a good presence out there when someone's actually coming to research you. That's one of the places people go now, is this business legit? Let me go check out their website, let me look at their social. Let me look at their reviews and ratings on other sites.
And that's another area we focus on is reputation building for our customers on Google, my business on being places on Yelp, whatever makes sense for their business, maybe it's Angie's list. And we do that through campaigns where we're either sending out SMS messages or email asking folks to give us feedback. Typically, we want to put some sort of incentive behind that to get them to actually act upon it.
Maybe it's a contest or some sort of reward for doing that. So that's another area is that local reputation. The content creation never stops for SEO, for social, for the press releases for blogs. So, I have, two full-time content folks on the team that's all they do is churn out good content. And I've seen a lot of success with our loyalty programs that we've built into our customers' sites.
Stacy: And those are like perks and rewards and benefits because everyone likes to get stuff for whatever they're doing and giving out.
Mike: And the secret is that in B2C the person that's your consumer, if you give them a discount, they're getting the benefit of that discount. But in B2B, it's a different story where the purchasing agent might be the one making the purchase. And if you give them a discount they don't care, they're not getting anything out of it.
So, rewarding through these programs with, a Yeti cooler, a Yeti tumbler, a Bluetooth radio, something like that. Maybe a travel card, travel rewards, something that they can personally use and take home with them. I've tested, moves the needle much more than any type of discount or rebate that maybe their boss will.
Stacy: I was going to say, the owner likes the rebate. The owner is happy with the rebate, but then the peeps underneath they're like, "What's for me here?"
Mike: Exactly. "What's in it for me?" That's a hundred percent. So, loyalty programs are great. People will spend more to achieve that next level of reward. They could have bought it cheaper somewhere else. They'll come to you and spend more, even if you have higher pricing. So, if they can take something home and see benefit, they can take home, a new North Face jacket. So, it's a little sneaky but it works and yes, the owners aren't going to love that.
Stacy: Even with B2C and when you're looking at different rewards and especially, I think with your younger Gen, like your Gen Z. Going up into millennials, that reward system, the badges, it's crazy to me. We have online classes and we do certifications. And one of my team members came to me and they're like, "We really need to give a badge that people can put on their LinkedIn after they finished the class."
I'm like, "My God, why do we have to do that?" "Oh, it's super popular. Everyone wants badges." So, they're like, "Look at me. I got a badge." It's the whole thing of like, "Oh, I played the game. I have my certificate." And little tiny things like points. There are apps out there and websites out there where really your points are valued at .00002 cents like nothing is, but you have 7,300 of those little stars. And there's a psychological, like hunger for people to do things with that.
Mike: A hundred percent. So, it works, the B2B's don't think about all this stuff and you have to attack it.
Stacy: They want the gift.
Mike: So, beyond that, we're doing a bunch of video production, which is a lot of fun. We're doing testimonial videos. We're doing about us, like who we are videos. We're doing a lot of whiteboards. Especially short, brief, 15 second chunks of content. Great for social, and a lot of on the B2B side, not very common, there's not a lot of video production going on.
So, we're helping to make it easy to explain what our clients do and what the products do with these short videos. And even producing video television commercials. Animated actually is the last one we just put together.
So, these are a lot of fun and I really never thought I'd be in this business. I've been on the other side of the fence for 23 years and working with folks like me and just found an opportunity and had no agency experience, but have been enjoying it.
And one of the things that I bring to the table, because I know the pain points that I had running a business. And working with agencies is that often an agency will take ownership of accounts and that transition, they make leaving the agency really tough.
So that's one thing that I'm like, day one, when I'm writing out my business plan, I said, I don't want to hamstring my customers. I want to make it easy to leave me. And I think that is me putting my money where my mouth is. So, I structured the business with, we use their accounts and typically we'll ask our customers for maybe it's their info or their help account. And we need to go set up accounts. We'll use that. So, they have full access to it.
Additionally, I don't have anyone in any kind of contracts or month to month. I send out an agreement to protect everyone with privacy and confidentiality non-competes and all that, but I make it easy for my clients to leave. And maybe it's a psychological thing, but my clients they're not leaving. So that's a good thing.
And that structure has encouraged me and my team to hustle. We're not resting on our laurels and sitting on a six-month contract where we know that if we're not showing a return on investment every single week we're out. So, we send out status reports every Monday to every single one of our clients with metrics saying, here's how, make it easy for them to move on. But it's working.
Stacy: So, with everything you did, you certainly with starting a business. Beginnings of COVID, you did solve one thing that most entrepreneurs and agency owners have to figure out pretty early on is where your business is going to be and having to actually get office space and so forth. And it's perfect because you can be in your house with the rest of us and learning how to be virtual from the very get-go.
Mike: You're right. Actually, I was looking for office space. I started on March 10th looking for office space. Because I knew I needed to be out of here. There's a lot of commotion. I have two kids now there's even more commotion because they're home most of the time doing remote learning. Also, I have a dog and luckily my timing couldn't have been better. I had two contracts in hand or spaced and then COVID hit. Saved.
So, thank God I didn't sign anything, but I have been remote. I have a team now of 20 they're all over the country. The majority I'd say 10 of them are in the Chicago land area. And that's where I am. And eventually, when we are all vaccinated and we can go back to living our normal lives, I would like to get out and see other humans. I miss that. But for now, this is working and the business is growing.
I have yet to really do any marketing for my own business, which is kind of ironic because that's what I do. I'm a marketing company and I've grown through word of mouth. Have just a whole slew of different types of customers that are depending on us for all of their marketing needs. And it's a fun business to be in. I love it. It's all day is solving problems for my customers and trying to scale and grow their businesses.
Stacy: And I'm sure what you also like is after 23 years of working for businesses. Every day is different when you're an agency owner. There's something different you can't plan on it and you get to learn all the time and keep growing yourself as you're helping other people grow. It's really rewarding.
Mike: It is very rewarding. I'm getting new challenges thrown at me every day. One of the other things that I'm loving about this is finding synergies between my clients, where I can introduce my clients and then they can start working together. I have a client that is a startup hand-foot operated hand-sanitizer dispenser. And then I have another client that is a janitorial sanitation product wholesaler.
I put those guys together, marriage made in heaven and now the manufacturer selling through the wholesaler. So that's a lot of fun when you can grow just by making introductions and everyone wins.
Stacy: One thing I wanted to touch on just because it was in your LinkedIn resume. And I talked to you about it before as well, is apps because we have so many clients who want an app, like everyone wants an app. It used to be like what everyone wanted a website back in the day, but apps are very different than websites. And they're a different beast entirely. What are some of the tricks and tools that you use to make sure an app is actually relevant for a brand?
Mike: Most of the apps that I've built they accompany the mobile website or the e-commerce site for my customers. They're full functional, and they actually have more functionality than the e-commerce sites themselves. And the whole reason, they, weren't a hundred percent necessary, but they do help to drive business. On a mobile phone and especially on a mobile device, it takes more effort to go into your Safari or Chrome, typing an URL or go to your favorites. That takes time.
Having an icon on your home screen with one finger you tap and you're shopping makes life a lot easier. You can also add some additional features to using the native functionality of the phone to make shopping easier. One thing that we've used with a lot of successes, using the camera and using that for scanning products, especially scanning barcodes and that can bring the product pages directly up.
So, someone in the B2B world, a lot of our clients' customers have stock rooms of some sort and what we do in those stock rooms or what we advise them to do is, or provide them our labels, barcode labels that they can put on little bins throughout their stockroom. So, when they're getting low, they can pick up their phone and just scan that label.
If they still have the product in stock in their stockroom, they can pick up the product and scan that too. So that helps with the inventory management and keeping their inventory up to date. Besides that, I think having the voice recognition on a phone saves our customers a lot of time where they can just click to talk and talk their search right into the search box. And those are like the native tools. The camera we also use too.
If you have a part that you need replaced then you can identify it, we build out capability to take a photo of that part and then submit it to our tech support whichever client to identify what part that is. You'll find in the B2B world, there are millions of parts. And it's sometimes pretty tough to identify something that was potentially manufactured, 80 years ago has been in production and broke, and now you need to replace it.
And there's no markings on the product, but most of my customers have tech support that can help identify what those products are. And beyond that, with the apps, we try to make the e-commerce site and the apps easy to shop. So, we do things like custom catalogs. So that when a user returns to the app, first, we automatically sign them in because having to re-sign in every time is a nightmare. And then they can shop their custom catalog of a mix of things they've already purchased from us either offline.
Stacy: Start surfing and swiping and poking away, or is it better to actually capture their information? So, what you just said is whenever they come back, it's there, it's logged in and you know who you're talking to and you're able to re-market.
Mike: I think user experience is at the core of every decision I make. And that's the foundation. So, making it easy to use, not requiring login, or using like facial recognition or thumb, and your fingerprint to get in, if you can do something like that. But it has to be easy. So, everything we build has a B2C side and a B2B side. The B2C side is you're there like a consumer, you're probably looking at list price and not your discounted, your custom pricing. And you're able to search the catalog. You're able to build a cart. You can check out as a guest.
It's not that you're not getting your discounted price. But at least you can do your research and pull down, specification sheets and watch videos on the products. And maybe that's all you needed to do. So why do I need to put a barrier in front of you, to moving the hurdles?
Depending on the company, I'd say a lot have changed and are changing to make that process easier, that self-activation. There's still a lot out there it's too difficult to even get started with their tool.
Stacy: So, I know we're running out of time. And what I'd love to do is have you share how people can find you, where do they find Mike?
Mike: They can find me at MainEventDigital.com. And from there there's links to a bunch of our social media. And on the website, there is information about the types of customers and our packages and our pricing. Let's go with $2,000 off your first month. So, get a hold of me, tell me that you heard me on the Stacy Jones, Hollywood Branded Podcast.
Stacy: Marketing Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them, or Stacy Jones, Hollywood Branded any of those things are fine. All work.
Mike: Thank you. And I'm happy to give you a discount on your first month.
Stacy: Awesome. That's very awesome. Any last words of parting advice?
Mike: I think I'm going to go back to something I said at the beginning, if you build it, don't expect people to come. You need to hit people, your potential customers and your current customers. You need to educate them from every possible angle. And that's what we do. And it's tough to do that on your own.
So, find an expert, find a specialist that can run your paid campaigns, run your SEO, get you in the marketplace, affiliate programs. You need someone that knows what they're doing and has learned from making the mistakes which I have, and has the experience. And you're going to spend more trying to go at it on your own.
Stacy: Super beneficial. We tell people all the time, why would you hire an agency? We want to hire an agency because the reason why they know what to do is because they've screwed up lots of times and learned, and they know how not to do that. And you're going to screw up lots on your own if you try to do it yourself.
Mike: Right. Why don't you benefit from someone else's mistakes?
Stacy: Which creates expertise.
Mike: Exactly. It's good to make mistakes. You learn.
Stacy: Mike, thank you so much for joining us today. You provided a lot of valuable insights for our listeners.
Mike: My pleasure, Stacy. Thanks so much for having me. It's been a great afternoon. Thank you.
Stacy: Good. And to all of our listeners, thank you for tuning into Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them. I look forward to chatting with you next week. Until then have a great day.
